Assassin's Creed II : Assassins or Mob Bosses?

While I found myself pleased with the first installment of the Assassin's Creed franchise, in spite of its shortcomings, I felt lost. Despite the tight controls, the higher than expectations story, and superb graphics, I didn't feel connected to the worlds of Jerusalem and Damascus. I felt like I was just going through the motions of being an assassin (apparently it's quite redundant work). Enter Assassin's Creed II. This installment is something to behold. The graphics are even better, the controls even tighter, and the story even bigger. Everything on the game play front that I didn't like in Assassin's Creed has been corrected and allows for a tremendous gaming experience and will at least be involved in discussion for Game of the Year, though it most likely won't win.

Following that introduction, this review is screaming towards a close to perfect rating. Unfortunately, the game doesn't get to that stature. But there is a plethora of negative news in the world so I'll start with all the things Assassin's Creed II does well.

The game is gorgeous. The cities of Florence, Tuscany, and Venice are bursting at the seams with life. People wander the streets, interact with each other, and some interact with you. Gone are the boring, repetitious character models of the citizens that plagues the series' first installment. The vast number of models gives you the feel that you never meet the same person twice. The landscapes are stunning. The rolling hills of Tuscany, the canals and harbors of Venice, all are masterfully crafted and designed. Ezio, our new playable assassin, and other characters are all well designed and even better voiced. The dialogue is fairly clean of cheesy, or clichéd remarks and is fairly intelligent. The controls are close to flawless. Almost everything is climbable. Ubisoft almost completely eradicated the infuriating issue of running up a wall only to see your assassin leap frog into a group of guards because you can't climb up that particular wall. Running on the rooftops is even better in ACII and makes you feel all the more dominant over your adversaries. And let me express that you are indeed dominant. Never once in this game do you feel overmatched, but I'll get back to this in a bit.

The combat is more involved than in the previous game, but still needs some work. You do have a greater number of weapons to choose from and get to upgrade them in an RPG-esque way, but it still doesn't feel interactive enough. Early in the game you come into possession of your Uncle Mario's villa. (Uncle Mario is introduced in a charming way by stating "Ezio, don't you remember me? It's a-me, Mario!" all in an Italian accent. Sound familiar fellow gamers?) The Villa acts as your base. And in typical fashion, it's an eyesore when you take it over, just screaming to be fixed up. As you spend money to fix up the church, the brothel, the doctor, the blacksmith, among others, the value of the Villa goes up generating more money for you as well as upgrading the weapons being sold by your vendors at a discounted price. It's a nice hybrid of RPG elements mixed in with this Action/Adventure game, even if these elements are a bit bland and can be completed far too easily.

Story-wise the game excels. The Desmond sequences are there but only a few exist. At first I thought this a good
thing, but the few segments are quite good and make you want more of them to help flesh out the plot (which still leaves you baffled by the end). Instead of Altair in the Middle-East, you're Ezio during the Italian Renaissance. You meet many prestigious (and infamous) Italian families as well as rubbing elbows with the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci, and Niccolo Machiavelli. Leonardo serves as Ezio's personal inventor and will give you different weapons and devices to use as you find items (called Codex Pages) for him to decipher. Admittedly it seems a bit strange to be dealing with Da Vinci in this way, and while that's true, it does work better than it sounds. The repetitious missions are gone and the assassination targets are more entertaining and more in number. If you want to tackle side missions (assassination contracts, races, courier errands, beat up events) for some extra cash, their always available in droves. But if you spend any time developing your Villa, you won't need the petty bucks these bring and other than for peace of mind purpose, can be ignored if desired.

Even after one good installment, and one great installment (ACII) I still don't feel it. This game is fantastic and an absolute blast to play, but I feel no connection to the characters, with the exception of Desmond and the group of Matrix style hackers. But honestly, I love the story, the setting, and the gameplay. It's quite a hybrid system that makes everyone happy. It's an Action game during the swordplay, the story and item collecting are built like an adventure game, many assassin techniques give the feel of a stealth style of play, there are a great array of mind puzzles and well as Prince of Persia type (as in exactly) exploration, and an RPG feel of "leveling up" your Villa.

The few negatives are deterring enough to me to only warrant no more than one additional playthrough, perhaps to refresh myself prior to Assassins Creed III. As mentioned, I don't feel any connection with the characters. A character is introduced mostly just to show your next target. The game moves like this most of the way with some intriguing side characters based on real Italian citizens but their "one and done" appearances make their cameo's brief and leave you wanting more. The difficulty is almost laughable. Sure, you want to remain anonymous (as opposed to notorious) but it really doesn't matter because you'll be able to kill as many guards as you run into with no problem. Some of the puzzles are tricky, and you may die a few times from falling from some skyscraper viewpoints, but not enough to say the game has any kind of hard side to it.

Briefly, if you have any issue with kids playing games based on rating, take a long, hard look at Assassin's Creed II before you let them play. It is violent but nothing really gruesome, there is one sex scene towards the beginning but it's at the low end of PG-13, however innuendo is fairly routine throughout. The language can get harsh too. It's not consistently rough, but it has spikes in content and fairly abrupt at that. Lucy shouts at Desmond; "Desmond!! Shut the f*** up!!" And later during a voice over on a puzzle, a voice says how "she cried as I f***** her." These would be the high end spikes in content that parents may take issue with for their kids.

There may be some negatives about the game that bother me personally, but they are too subjective to really hold them against the game, or give a poor rating over. However, they are issues, and even though I enjoyed the experience, I didn't feel fulfilled in playing through it. As I was playing, I felt like the story was being rushed (even though it spans over decades) and I felt like there were volumes of material to flesh out characters, cities, and the story that were simply not explored. But overall, with the brilliance of everything else in this title, all the praise it's going to get is entirely well earned and well deserved, and it's get's that praise from me also.